Philippe wore his smile like a bowtie—fixed in place, but a genuine part of his personality. He worked at L’Hotel de Felicitie in the 17th district of Paris, where I was staying for my fall break last year. I was sitting alone in the hotel café, writing a new novel, when Philippe struck up amiable conversation. He went out of his way to ask about my travels, showed no revulsion when I mentioned my Christian studies, and even ventured to give me a café crème on the house. It turned out that he was actually from Milan, Italy, and worked half the year in the hotel to support his family. Every word from his mouth radiated warmth. He asked me questions and brought me coffee and laughed at my stumbling jokes like a true Austenian gentleman. For every ounce of flirtatious failure I oozed, he matched with an equal ounce of charm. We parted ways an hour later and traded but two or three more sentences before I left Paris altogether. It was all right. I had that morning’s memory tucked away for later rediscovery and treasuring.
Seven days passed.
I was perched on a couch back in the Italian dormitory, perusing the internet after a long school day, when a fellow student, Annie, pulled off her headphones.
“There was a bombing in Paris!” Annie cried.
I sat upright. The three or four other students in the room looked up and pushed their textbooks aside.
“What? When?” I asked.
“Just a little while ago,” Annie said. “I saw it on the news and pulled it up. It looks like a terrorist attack.”
“Are you serious?” another girl asked. “We were just there. All of us.”
“Come here and watch,” Annie said.
Twenty-some people were dead when we first gathered around her laptop to watch the live news reports roll in. By dark, the toll had climbed to seventy. I watched the ribbon scroll across the bottom of the screen. I heard the strain in the reporter’s voice; she said the Eiffel Tower had gone dark—I still remembered how the wind snagged my hair when I stood at the top a few short days ago. The Shakespeare and Company building had blackened their own windows to hide—I bought two books there. Hostages were corralled in a stadium I had seen lit by studded electric bulbs instead of flames. By the next morning, the terrorists had mostly been caught or killed, and the official death toll was 130, with over 350 injured.
They were calling it ‘11/13’. France issued a state of national emergency and closed its borders.
“We would have been stuck there,” Annie said.
At some point, I messaged my mother. Even though she knew I had left Paris the week before, she later told me she didn’t sleep for days after she heard the news. I remember I only told her after I absorbed the closeness of the attack. As a child of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, terrorism was nothing new to me. It began with September 11th, which I remember as The Day Mommy Cried Watching TV. It blossomed into the Iraq War, the Boston Marathon bombing, a hundred odd school shootings. It was familiar now. Like a distant relative released from jail—dangerous and real, but just distant enough not to be a personal threat.
But this was different. The arms of terror were wrapped around a city which I had touched so recently that I hadn’t yet washed the jeans I wore on the train ride back. Terror reached after me down the tracks with a piercing howl that rang in my ears for many nights, and sometimes still does.
It was strange knowing my old white sneakers had strolled the same pavement now stained with blood. I thought about the young lady behind the Shakespeare and Company register. I thought about our tour guide when I enjoyed a walking night tour of the city’s enchanted streets; she was an American theater student, working her way through a Master’s, I believe. She lived near the Tower.
With a rude start, I thought about Philippe. He hadn’t been due to travel back to Milan for another few months, and there was no doubt in my bones that he was still in the city. He was stuck there. Had he been at the football game in the stadium where the first suicide bomber appeared? Had he been sipping an espresso in one of the cafés or restaurant fronts that were riddled with bullets? Was he injured? Missing?
I thought about the café crème. Philippe saw a lone, young, American study abroad student writing furiously in a shadowy hotel coffee room, and took it upon himself to make her comfortable. His wellspring of gentlemanly charm. His bowtie smile. I had no way of knowing whether or not the only man to ever buy me a drink was alive or dead. No amount of studying theology could counter the helplessness and humility I felt in that moment. Begging to my God would not tell me whether or not the people I met in Paris were safe. The sheer amount of trust and faith I needed in those days was almost crushing.
Never have I felt more human than I did then. A speck on the face of a bloody planet.
